Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

It is easy to forget now, given the Iraq quagmire, how deeply all of us were struck by this elemental truth as we watched those images of horror on our television screens. One hundred thousand Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill a few days after the outrage for a memorial service. The French daily Le Monde published a headline that read “We Are All Americans,” a deliberate echo of John Kennedy’s famous declaration forty years earlier at the Brandenburg Gate: “I am a Berliner.” It was how we all felt. When the Americans decided to respond to the attack from al-Qaeda with a mission to root out its bases in Afghanistan, and its basis of support among the Taliban, their response was understandable and reasonable. As members of NATO, which is after all a self-defence pact, we had a moral if not a legal duty to support them. We also had self-interest in doing so.

  If the transition from the Taliban regime to the government Afghans later chose has been a disappointment, it must be in part because the Bush administration became preoccupied with a larger and more dubious adventure in Iraq, whose relationship to September 11 was repeatedly suggested without ever being adequately explained. Interestingly, the Bush administration never applied any pressure on me for Canada to join the United States in Iraq. I unequivocally supported Prime Minister Chrétien’s decision to stay out of Iraq once the United States decided to go it alone without the United Nations. At one point when I was prime minister, the U.S. administration asked that we send forty military trainers to Iraq, which we declined, end of subject.1 In these cases, as in others in my experience, the Canadian officials who deal directly with their American counterparts are often spooked by the dreadful implications of not falling into line with U.S. policy. Usually these are not as severe as they have been led to imagine, and so it was with Iraq.

  The tragedy of the Iraq excursion, when we consider Afghanistan, is that the military and development resources as well as the diplomatic capital that the United States might have applied to great effect in Afghanistan were diverted elsewhere. But as for Canada, we were in Afghanistan for the right reasons and, having been part of displacing the Taliban regime, we continued to have a duty to help construct something sturdy to replace it. It has been an unfortunate aspect of Canadian foreign policy that we are sometimes happy to sun ourselves in the warm glow of public opinion — domestic and international — when we are in the midst of a crisis but later act as if making a commitment is the same thing as fulfilling it.

  My view of the Afghanistan mission was that it needed to fit within our overall foreign and defence priorities. I understood that this was more a peacemaking than a peacekeeping mission, as were many others I expected us to be called upon to perform: in Haiti, and Darfur, and perhaps in the Middle East. That’s why I sought and received General Hillier’s assurance that our role in Afghanistan would not compromise what I felt could be an increasing role in other theatres, and most certainly in Darfur.

  One of the reasons I strongly supported General Hillier’s appointment as chief of the defence staff was his view that Canada’s Armed Forces had to be capable of responding quickly to new demands. I also strongly believe that you cannot do much good in failed or fragile states with military force alone. You need to engage people’s hearts and minds, and the way to do this is rebuild economic infrastructure along with social and political and judicial institutions. One of the lessons of Haiti is that military intervention without this kind of follow-through means that you have to come back time and time again, intervening in crises but never fixing the underlying problems.

  All that having been said, the mission in Afghanistan was a collective one, shared by the NATO allies among others. Our responsibilities as Canadians were to play our part, not to shoulder any and all burdens that might come our way. When I came to office, we had nearly two thousand troops in Afghanistan, mostly in Kabul. They were there on the understanding that they would be rotated in for a time and then replaced by troops from other countries. One of the first things I was told as prime minister by NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was that he would like Canada to extend its commitment because there was no other country ready to step up to replace us. My reply was straightforward: “We are pulling our troops out according to schedule. You have got to find a replacement. I am not going to negotiate this.” The secretary-general came back empty-handed, several times, and repeated his plea. My answer was the same. Finally, he found replacements, and I learned a valuable lesson: whatever commitment we made, we needed to have an end date and an assured rotation out.

  It was always clear in my mind, in the instructions I gave to General Hillier and in my interaction with our NATO allies in Brussels, that Canada had a long-term commitment to the Afghanistan mission. We needed to rotate our troops out, yes, but we were prepared to consider sending them back in at a later point. We were not going to get ourselves locked into an open-ended commitment, however, and there were good and precise reasons for that. First of all, the Canadian military had lived with decades of tightening budgets. We did not have the capacity to do everything we wanted to do militarily in the world as a result. I came to office publicly committed to doing something about that, and quickly laid out a plan to rebuild our military, but the necessary reinvestment had barely begun. In the meantime, our troops needed to be relieved and rested. Some of them were even needed to train the new recruits we were going to bring into the military. And it was important that our military commitment in Afghanistan not crowd out every other mission we might choose to undertake.

  General Hillier was a key player in the Afghanistan mission during my administration and since. Canada’s military spending had been inadequate throughout my adult life, and the cuts I had imposed during the deficit fight hadn’t helped. I believed it was time to reverse this, because a robust military is an important element in an effective foreign policy as well as a foundation of national sovereignty. In my time out of office, I had spent a great deal of time thinking about military matters, and consulting with military experts such as Dr. Doug Bland, chair of defence studies at Queen’s, and David Pratt, whose expertise made him the obvious choice to be my first defence minister. One of my first acts as prime minister was to go to Defence headquarters overlooking the Rideau Canal in downtown Ottawa and meet with soldiers and staff. It was a signal of the importance I placed on our Armed Forces. My view was that we needed to have a larger military with an ability to deploy rapidly, and with the latest equipment for the men and women we were putting in harm’s way. After the election, I needed to replace David Pratt, who had unfortunately lost his seat, and asked Bill Graham, whose experience at foreign affairs would prove invaluable, to take the job.

  General Hillier and the senior people at Defence worked out the plans for our future deployment to Kandahar. Some confusion later arose about whether Canada ended up in Kandahar because it was all that was available by the time we made the decision to redeploy. The fact is we could not have deployed earlier because our overstretched troops needed an “operational pause” to recuperate and retrain. Moreover, there were logistical advantages to Kandahar because of its proximity to Kabul, which would allow us to draw on the supply chain we had already set up there. Certainly, General Hillier was enthusiastic about committing to the Kandahar mission, and I supported him in that. It may be, as some have subsequently claimed, that the proposal to go to Kandahar was delayed by wrangling between the departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs. But by the time the issue reached my desk in the late winter of 2005, the decision was a straightforward one and was made within a few weeks.

  The move to a more forward deployment in Afghanistan was an absolutely essential part of making progress in the country. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, had been mocked as the “mayor of Kabul” because the central government was unable to extend its reach much beyond the capital.2 NATO had developed a plan for its troops to move out into the provinces, gradually pacifying them and allowing the incremental extension of areas safe for reconstruction. Interestingly, many of the Canadian non-government
al organizations working in Afghanistan opposed the plan. Their argument was that the increased military activity would expose aid workers to harm from the Taliban. The Canadian military, on the other hand, strongly supported it, arguing that meaningful reconstruction could only take place in close association with the growth of safe areas. I agreed with them.

  It is important to understand the strategy as it was originally devised, because as the troops moved into Kandahar and began military operations under the Conservatives, its two principal thrusts were largely abandoned. The plan General Hillier presented to me was based on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, meaning the gradual restoration of order by the military in expanding circles, with reconstruction intimately linked and immediately underway once the area was secured. There was no point in dominating an area militarily if we did not win the fight for “hearts and minds” once we got there. In my time as prime minister, we never envisaged a broad military campaign that would make reconstruction efforts more difficult, if not impossible, as we bit off more than we could chew. In my view, the change in strategy under the subsequent government was un fortunate. I don’t think anyone, including me, expected the Taliban resurgence that Canadian troops encountered when they moved to Kandahar. I do believe, however, that the virtual abandonment of reconstruction efforts in the first year or so of the new government was a mistake.

  Second, when I was prime minister, I made a one-year commitment to Kandahar. My earlier experience with NATO’s secretary-general convinced me that a short-term time limit was necessary if we were going to retain flexibility for our forces and have maximum leverage with NATO. I fully expected that the deployment might be extended for another year as we worked out the details of our being relieved by troops from another country. But the time limit was there to put NATO on notice from the start that our commitment was not open-ended and that all NATO members had to live up to their responsibilities. That isn’t “cutting and running;” that’s common sense. And that is why it was such a mistake for Stephen Harper, in his first months as prime minister, to make our troop commitments virtually open-ended. This made it harder for Canada to negotiate within NATO to make sure others did their share. The Harper government now says that our NATO partners have to be held to account. The time to do that was at the start, not much later into the deployment.

  1 We were already providing Iraq-related police training in Jordan.

  2 On one occasion when I was at the United Nations in New York, an elevator operator there told me that he had once been the actual mayor of Kabul. Such is the fate of politicians out of office — although it can be argued that he is going up in the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  To Govern Is to Choose

  As prime minister, there are issues you choose and there are issues that are thrust upon you. I would not be truthful if I claimed that the issue of same-sex marriage was one that I expected would play a role in my years in office. But so it was to be. And I’m glad.

  On Sundays when I am home at the farm in Knowlton, I attend St. Rose de Lima, a small country church nearby. When I was prime minister, one day after mass the parish priest did something unusual. He returned to his pulpit and told us that he had more to say. Frankly, I felt that he had already had his chance when he gave his sermon, and as usual I was a bit impatient to get home. A few days earlier, however, nine women had been ordained in Gananoque as priests in a Catholic ceremony; it goes without saying that this was not approved in Rome. The parish priest said he wanted to talk about this, and I thought, Oh my gosh, here we go. To my astonishment, he said, “I want to tell you that nowhere in the scripture did Jesus say that women couldn’t be priests.”

  After mass, I went up to him and said, “Father, that was terrific.”

  “Well, Mr. Martin,” he replied, “I may be in trouble with the bishop, and I think you are too.” He was referring to my position on same-sex marriage.

  “You know I’m right,” he continued. “And so are you.”

  I have not spoken much about my Catholic faith in this book for the simple reason that for the most part I do not believe that it is relevant. I am, and have been, a practising Catholic all my life, but I regard that as a personal matter. I believe the question of the role of religious belief — and specifically the Roman Catholic faith in relation to public life — was settled as a practical matter in North America by John Kennedy in the 1960 election when I was in university, and later by Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, on a more philosophical plane, before I had entered politics. For Kennedy, only the second serious Catholic candidate for the presidency, and the first to win, the issue of his relationship to the church was a significant one. At an important speech to a mainly Protestant audience in 1960, he said that he believed in a politics “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesial source…. Whatever issue may come before me as President — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest.”

  It was in that tradition that Mario Cuomo gave a famous speech to the theology department at the University of Notre Dame in 1984 in which he laid out his view of how to reconcile his Catholic religious beliefs and his responsibilities as a political leader. Remove the specifically American flavour — the Americans are really not as singular as they like to think — and Cuomo’s views conform closely to my own:

  “The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics, throughout most of American history, have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them that we would hold to be sinful.

  “I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us. This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern.”

  Of course, the years since Kennedy’s election have also been turbulent ones. The Second Vatican Council under Pope John XXIII opened up the church and also exposed it to unprecedented questioning from the faithful. Catholics were suddenly debating birth control and abortion — as were non-Catholics, of course. Catholics also began to discuss whether women should be allowed into the priesthood, and whether priests should be required to be unmarried and celibate. The list goes on. In the case of birth control, most Catholics in North America simply ignored the edicts of the church. Many of us found ourselves “cherry-picking” those parts of the official Catholic teaching we agreed with, often ignoring the rest. This weakening of the hold that the church had on faithful Catholics was very distressing to the church authorities, and I understand that.

  I remember some years ago having a conversation with a childhood friend who is a Catholic missionary. He talked about the particular challenges he faced in his work, where the teachings of the church did not always fit sensibly with the real lives of the people he worked with. He had fashioned his own Catholicism, one that he believed kept faith both with the church and with the people to whom he ministered. I think that I have tried to do something similar in my secular profession. There are, of course, some politicians who enter politics very much as a completion of their religious mission. Tommy Douglas and Preston Manning are two examples that spring to mind. That is not my case.

  What does all this mean? Two things. First, while I am a practising Catholic, I do not necessarily share the church’s view on every moral issue. Second, that even when I share the church’s view, I do not think it is necessarily wise to try to impose it on others. On abortion, for example, I am uneasy about it. B
ut I do not believe that I can substitute my own judgment for that of a woman facing a difficult, and very personal, moral decision. I also worry about the back-street abortions that would inevitably occur if we placed legal limitations on the ability to get a safe medical procedure.

  It is worth saying here, by the way, that some variation on this point of view was held by Prime Ministers Trudeau, Clark, Turner, Mulroney, and Chrétien — all of whom were Catholics. Abortion was not a major issue in my time as prime minister, as it was in previous decades. However, the issue of same-sex marriage was, and it raised similar questions.

  Same-sex marriage first came up in Parliament when Jean Chrétien was prime minister, and like the overwhelming majority of MPs I voted to reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage as a union of a man and woman. It wasn’t a difficult decision. It was simply what I had always believed, and I didn’t think much more about it. My position changed over the next few years, and some have wondered why. The answer is pretty simple too: like many people, I began thinking about the issue much more deeply.

  Something that affected me greatly was a story told to me by a friend. His daughter had been a girl of great energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, fun, and accomplishment up until about the age twelve or thirteen. At that point things began to go wrong in her life, and she got into difficulties at home and at school. At fourteen and fifteen, it just got worse. By the time she was sixteen she was clearly depressed and possibly even suicidal. Her parents could not fathom what had happened to their lovely, happy girl. And then, in her later teen years, she met another young woman and suddenly everyone understood. My friend and his wife said, “This is our daughter; we love our daughter.” They supported her. And soon the problems vanished. Today, she has her Ph.D. and lives with her partner on the West Coast.

  That story had a profound effect on me. Was I prepared to accept the situation where this young woman, because of nothing but who she was, would not be allowed to find happiness? On reflection, I decided that I was not.